Over the past fifty years, readers in the English-speaking world have come to wide agreement that Mavis Gallant is one of the twentieth century’s finest writers of short fiction. But what readers have never been able to appreciate is just how important Gallant’s early journalism was to her development as a writer. After getting herself hired at the Montreal Standard as a young woman with very little experience, Gallant published some 125 pieces for the Standard from 1944 to 1950. Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant (from which the story below has been excerpted) shows for the first time how Gallant’s journalism so clearly and tellingly informs her fiction—and how aware she was in the 1940s of the rich training ground that her journalism was giving her. It isn’t simply the encyclopedic range of the subject material she chose. More, it’s the ways in which, in Gallant’s early writing for the Standard, we can discern her first steps towards developing what was to become her singular narrative style—that rich alloy of irony, deadpan humour, minutely reported detail, and lyrical intensity that is hers alone. —Neil Besner
A Wonderful Country
December 14, 1946
I called him the Hungarian because I couldn’t pronounce his name. If he had a name for me, I never heard it. We weren’t what you’d call chummy.
It was early in the war then, when there were still houses to rent and apartment hunters who could afford to be choosy. I was a junior assistant in a real estate office, making next to nothing and chasing every cent. That was how we met.
If it had been any other way, we might have become friends, because we were both so lonely in Montreal. But as it was, he needed a furnished house and I needed a commission, so I never bothered to ask if he liked Canada or anything else. I just waved street maps and leases and talked fast.
He didn’t know very much about this side of the world, and I was too busy to help him. He lived alone in a hotel, waiting for his family and seldom going even to the Hungarian club. All he could say was “Yes?” or “Please?” or “No, no, no,” all of which meant “I don’t understand.”
It was hot that summer. I rang sticky doorbells and talked to cross, perspiring people all over the city trying to find a Hungarian a house. It had to be furnished. It had to have a yard and a nice room for his little girl. I’d like to see him try that these days. Even then, with places available, it wasn’t easy.
Then a phone call came in one afternoon with something that sounded just about right. I didn’t put it on the office list. I just picked him up at his hotel and started explaining in a taxi.
“It’s suburban,” I said, trying to make it sound all right. “A little far, a little quiet. Not too original, but good for the children.”
“I wouldn’t want it for myself,” I said impetuously, then stopped at once. “You’ll like it,” I went on firmly. “And besides, they’re leaving all the linen and dishes for you.”
“Yes?” he said.
As I said before, we had few conversations. Talking to him was like being lost in the bush. You could either sit down and give up or just keep stumbling ahead, hoping to come to something familiar.
“Linen,” I repeated. “Towels, blankets, sheets. Pillowcases, bath mats, tablecloths. Glasses, cups, soup plates.”
“Please,” he said.
I gave up.
T he taxi stopped in front of a small brick duplex on one of those semi-suburban streets. There was a small lawn, yellow from the August sun, and a bicycle leaning against the porch. All the shades were down, as though the tenants had left for the summer. The street was still and flat, edged with telephone poles. I turned and said quickly, “After all, it’s the inside that matters,” but he was smiling and bending his smooth grey head toward the window.
“So,” he said, with a certain finality and marched up the cement walk. The couple who answered the door were alike as two pink junkets. The woman looked a bit sharper, as I remember her now, and rather sick. Her husband, whom she called Frank, was taller, but with the same pale eyes and thin fair hair. They didn’t look at each other. Sometimes, by accident, their glances crossed, and it was like two express trains passing at full speed.
She did all the talking. Once in a while, she would turn to him with a quick “Isn’t that right, Frank,” then pick up the conversation again before he could answer.
She had made duplicate lists of every item in the house, she told us, and wanted them all checked. My Hungarian went on smiling and sometimes made small, chirping sounds under the current of her words. Frank looked bored and sleepy.
I just stared at the brown wallpaper and wondered if she wore hairnets to bed and hoover aprons in the morning. It was all beyond me. I couldn’t imagine why she was moving out or why he was moving in. I didn’t know any of them.
“I suppose you want to look the place over,” she finally offered.
“No,” said the Hungarian. “No, no, no.”
“Come on,” I said impatiently. “He’ll stand there all day saying that. He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Show him the living room.”
The woman looked a little amused and turned her shrewd small face to a curtained arch.
“In there,” she said.
We moved past her and plunged at once into a lifeless room so like a convent that I expected to hear a bell or see a plaster saint in one corner. You could smell wax and lemon oil and sense a faint layer of dust. But you couldn’t see very much because the air was dark green from years of being strained through window shades.
It was ugly. I remember, out of that clutter of plush and seashells, only one beautiful object: something made of tortoise shell, like a piece of fair freckled skin.
The woman circled the room, droning the items from her list and touching each thing as she mentioned it.
“One large radio,” she read. “One radio lamp. One lace cover on radio. One small mat under radio. One squirrel on swing.”
She hadn’t gone mad. The squirrel was two inches high and made of felt. He had probably come from a sale at the IODE. His place was on the radio, and as far as she was concerned, he was going to stay there, no matter who took over the house.
That was the astounding part of it. Not only had she taken the trouble to collect the room’s ugly contents but she had confirmed their existence by writing them in a list, one under the other. Now she was double-checking their identity by taking us on a tour and pointing out each plaque and doily as if it were a museum piece.
The Hungarian looked a little puzzled, but his smile was amiable as ever. I wished for the first time that I had made more effort to know him. The four of us were so disorganized in that room, it would have been nice to have felt some unity.
The dining room took less time to examine. The woman ticked off the furniture quickly and was starting in on the china cabinet when I cut in with: “Let’s look at the kitchen.”
I felt I couldn’t bear twenty minutes of “One china girl holding vinegar bottle, one small mustard pot marked Brantford, Ont.”
There ought to be a law against people who paint their kitchens buff and have strange grey cloths hanging from the pipes under the sink. It isn’t that the kitchens aren’t clean. It’s just that all you can imagine coming out of them are puddings and cold cuts. But the kitchen was the last room in the house, so I smiled reassuringly at the Hungarian.
He was watching the woman as she opened a drawer in the table and emptied it on the enamel top.
“One paring knife,” she began. “One egg beater.”
The Hungarian picked up the egg beater. He twirled the handle.
“What?” he announced.
“Eggs,” I said. “You beat them, see like this.”
Frank looked a bit indignant, but his wife actually broke an egg into a bowl and showed how it was done. The Hungarian loved it. He was particularly enchanted with the little top which fitted around the beater so it wouldn’t splash. He beat the egg into a great lemon froth. Then lovingly and reluctantly, he put the bowl down.
“Madam,” he said, “what a wonderful country.”
I t was the longest English sentence I had ever heard him speak. His cadence was that of a child’s sing-songing, something like, “Bees are there, birds are there, butterflies in the air . . .”
The woman stopped reading from her list and just watched him. His enthusiasm was wonderful. He exclaimed over everything, the string bean cutter, the cherry pitter, the breadknife with the measuring gadget, even the dish strainer.
I couldn’t believe he had never seen these things before. I thought he had come to life in this room because, bleak as it was, it was the only living part of the home. It was here that you could sense the thousands of oranges cut for breakfast, the hundreds of dish towels put to soak, the stacks of empty cereal boxes, the rubbers and overshoes draining by the back door, the toast crumbs, the coffee grounds, the potato peels, the shreds of pie crust. Nowhere else was there debris of living, or any explanation for the couple’s years together.
But I was wrong. When the Hungarian spent ten minutes playing with the automatic foot pedal on the garbage, I knew it was all genuine. For the first time, I saw the couple exchange a direct look. They thought he was foreign and ridiculous, and it was in his strangeness that they could find something in common.
“He’s worth ten of them,” I thought, though I scarcely knew him better. It was just that it annoyed me to see them standing on the doorway together, looking smug and secure.
“Let’s look at the linen,” I said, “and leave him here. He’s perfectly happy.”
The woman looked at her husband once more and led the way to a cupboard in the hall.
“You’ll find it all here, I think,” she said vaguely, then turned and said, so low I could hardly hear, “I’m going into the hospital, and my husband’s taking a furnished room. My little girl has gone to Toronto to stay with my mother. Fifty-fifty chance.”
It was a moment or two before I realized what she meant.
“Fifty-fifty,” I repeated stupidly, then realized she meant her chances in the hospital. I said something idiotic like, “Oh, you’ll be alright,” but she was back counting the linen again.
I wanted to shake her. It was like my neighbour whose son was killed at sea saying, “I suppose you heard about the laddie,” then rushing on to some inanity about gas rationing. “If you feel awful,” I wondered, “why don’t you scream and cry?” But there was no point saying it.
When we went back to the kitchen, I tried to let the Hungarian know that the people weren’t bad, that they were in as much of a spot as he was. But I knew this was no time to start explaining them to him or him to them. The interplay was all their own, and I had better leave them to it.
We turned down the hall together, and the woman held the front door open for us. I couldn’t look at her. Just as we were starting down the steps, he turned suddenly and caught her hand.
“Madam,” he said earnestly, “believe me, a wonderful country.”
“Well,” she said without expression, “I guess you could call it that.”
We didn’t hear the door slam till we were halfway down the walk. He was still chattering to himself about the wonderful country. I have often wondered how long the egg beater kept him happy.
Describing the events behind this piece to Marta Dvořák, Mavis Gallant explained, “The story actually goes back to September 1940 and my first job—I was eighteen. I looked in a newspaper and there was a job that looked interesting. It was working for a real estate firm—I’d never worked anywhere—I was young. You took people who wanted to rent an apartment and you wrote down everything that’s in it, but these people didn’t understand English and they didn’t understand French. It was, to me, completely fascinating.”
Excerpted from Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant, edited by Neil Besner, Marta Dvořák, and Bill Richardson. Copyright © The Estate of Mavis Gallant 2024. Published by Véhicule Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher.
